IBM Tivoli: Centralized control and maximum ROI

Smarter infrastructure management can drive down costs

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Cutting operational costs is now more than a goal—it’s a necessity. At a time when the gloomy economic climate threatens revenues across industries and business sectors, cost optimization is mandated for enterprise-class IT.

For many organizations, just maintaining the IT status quo is a significantly more expensive proposition than it should be. Consider that in many cases, two-thirds of the IT budget or more is dedicated to operations; only a third remains for strategic development. Yet it is strategic development, in the form of competitive innovation designed to pair well with customer interests, that will likely lead to business growth.

Ideally, organizations would be able to reverse that ratio, and with it, improve their business prospects going forward. Such a reversal, however, will typically require a new approach to how IT works. Imagine an IT infrastructure designed from the start to be smarter—accomplishing more tasks with fewer solutions, requiring less oversight and more effectively correlating technological changes with their future business impact. Equipped with such an infrastructure, organizations would be empowered with the actionable intelligence and the tools they require not just to reduce IT operations costs, but maintain—or even enhance—critical IT service levels.

IBM Tivoli delivers cross-silo, consolidated management of complex infrastructures

To achieve such goals, however, new management solutions will often be required. Here, IBM can help. The IBM Tivoli service management portfolio of offerings, developed on open standards for easy interoperability and a modular value proposition, are designed to generate maximum business value for virtually any organization with a complex IT infrastructure. This becomes possible through improved visibility (seeing the business), control (controlling the business) and automation (spurring business agility through automated technologies requiring no direct oversight). When information is orchestrated across silos, and the focus shifts from the technology to the services they support, the business outcome is enhanced—and Tivoli solutions help make that possible.

Understanding how IBM Tivoli tools can be leveraged to reduce costs and yet retain key service levels means understanding the typical infrastructure in place for many organizations at present—and the associated challenges. Commonly, different solutions are deployed to attend to different tasks; each solution is in turn managed by a dedicated tool.

As the number of solutions has grown, however, so has the number of management tools to monitor and configure them. So, in proportion, has the overall cost of managing the total IT infrastructure. Consider some of the ramifications of a management infrastructure governed by multiple, disparate tools: a slower response to changing conditions; more difficulty correlating information across tools to arrive at the business big picture; a less cohesive response to new goals or business mandates; decreased availability, diminished security and reduced compliance with government regulation; even catastrophic system failure. Collectively, this suboptimal arrangement means that IT is not the tuned and efficient engine of business strategy it should be. And with lower efficiency within IT operations comes heightened cost.

In contrast, IBM Tivoli offerings such as the IBM Tivoli Netcool, IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager and IBM Tivoli Monitoring suites deliver a single, consolidated management solution designed to swiftly translate technological changes into business impact. Once deployed, they make possible a faster response to dynamic conditions, higher service availability, higher productivity (or end-user satisfaction levels)—all while also reducing costs.

The above mentioned IBM Tivoli solutions work by distributing software agents to different IT solutions, then polling those agents for data that reflect status and performance levels. One of the important benefits stems from the fact that these solutions use a common data infrastructure. As a result, data can be collected from many different agents and stored in a common Data Warehouse. The warehoused data can be used in concert with real-time data as an analysis tool or to look at past data as a basis for setting proactive policies and thresholds. This capability is intended for the set of operators and key personnel to do problem analysis and resolution. For customers that want performance reports for their applications, this is available using IBM’s reporting technology, Tivoli Common Reporter. Once the data has been collected, it is then analyzed and represented for IT in whichever form is required, including cross-domain event consolidation, availability and performance management graphs and charts, security and compliance reports and others. This improved visualization means that IT managers always have complete command of both the business and technological dimensions of the infrastructure—essentially, IBM Tivoli solutions serve as their dashboard of control.

Shrinking costs through centralized, best-in-class management

The benefits of such an approach are abundant and compelling. For example, IT staff need not be trained for new management tools when new solutions are deployed. They can simply continue to use the same tools, merely deploying new software agents to collect data (or, in some cases, agentless options may be available). Furthermore, the need for new hardware to deploy and support management tools for new technologies is greatly reduced. In the case of complex composite applications that have multiple data sources and leverage multiple systems, the transaction path can accurately be traced and depicted—and technical problems can quickly be pinpointed and eliminated. In case of performance issues, deep dive diagnostics can be obtained for environments such as WebSphere Application Server and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to quickly troubleshoot and accurately pinpoint issues. Response times can be monitored both from an end user perspective (for example, web page load time) and also from an IT staff perspective (server response time, memory usage, and more). Finally, the benefits from the ability to consolidate events from multiple resources into a single pane of glass, the ability to prevent outages and improve the availability by predictive pattern recognition and analytics are quite compelling.

The sheer variety and scope of supported solutions and IT tasks is impressive, ranging from servers to databases to networks to end-user transactions to log file analysis to applications. Essentially every facet of the IT infrastructure can be monitored by IBM Tivoli solutions, ensuring it is properly configured and thus well positioned to help IT achieve business goals and drive down costs.

IBM Tivoli offerings also help to optimize not only the present but also the future through predictive analytics, proactive warnings and alerts. For example, if log analysis collected from ten different security solutions suggests that a breach has occurred, the appropriate IT staff member can be notified to take prompt action—thus diminishing the business impact of the breach, which might easily escalate in the near future. Or, alternately, if a key database is shortly to run out of available storage, a generated alert can notify IT to allocate more, helping to ensure that every application and user depending on that database will be able to continue to utilize it for the intended business purposes.

Still more value stems from the fact that through Tivoli management offerings, administrators can obtain information in exactly the level of granularity they need. Should a deeper dive into technical detail be required, it can easily be obtained; IBM Tivoli solutions can reflect the status and performance of both the IT forest and, be it necessary, the IT trees.

IBM Tivoli delivers major ROI in short order

How have IBM Tivoli management solutions already paid off for organizations interested in reducing overall IT costs?

One answer comes from an IDC study based on fourteen IBM clients who implemented IBM Tivoli Netcool solutions to consolidate and enhance their performance management, service quality management and network fault management. For communications service providers, these are complex challenges indeed; their distributed infrastructures will usually translate into an exceptional need for consolidated, optimized management that links technical shifts to business goals.

And according to IDC, the IBM Tivoli Netcool management platform delivered in every respect. In fact, on average, these organizations were found to have achieved a 625 percent return on investment, recouping the full initial costs in less than six months and generating an average annual benefit of $23.5 million—a truly impressive outcome at a time when every dollar counts.